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hello, got a 1999 outback here and the hvac controls (manual buttons/slider) do not change the air-flow. Everything else works, except maybe the recirc air button? it flickers green for a second as you push it in for recirc but I have no idea if it's actually working.

I am the second owner and the orig owner never let anyone drink in it. The cup holder was even broken, would not fully extract in order for the bottom support to drop down. Regardless I replaced the entire front unit with a salvaged one, which upon spraying copious amounts of windex in the crack above the selector buttons and blowing it out with compressed air... a little bit of brown windex came out, which i assume was cola residue. I repeated this until the windex came out clean. So, having two control units: one very well kept and the other extremely clean and with all other functions working properly on both units, I have to believe it's the actuator motor.

I crawled under the driver's footwell and looked up at the side of the center-console box and saw the flap arms. I can manually reach up and move the arms to achieve all 5 air-flow scenarios. It's made up of 3 set positions (defrost/feet/face) and causing the arms to rest between those 3 positions cause the two modes to work (defrost, feet / feet, face).

So, if I can reach up and move them, I must be missing the freaking motor right? I also found a very suspect connector. Can anyone tell me if, based on these images, if I am in fact missing the motor and if this is it's connector? I looked all over the interwebz for photos but found nothing for gen1.

In case the images do not load properly: The above image shows the yellow/white plastic arm linkages which can be manually moved to change the flaps. There is a metal bracket over the linkage, held down by 3 screws.

The connector in this image is white, with I believe 9 or 10 wires attached to a flat metal mounting bracket (slightly longer than the connector) with a hole in the middle of the section which protrudes past the female connector side of the socket.

..nevermind.. i found one in the junk yard!! probably the only one in the entire city. and yes i'm completely missing the actuator motor. So I grabbed it. when i hooked it up and pressed defrost it moved to what i assume is the defrost only position, and then.. nothing, no matter what button I pressed.

it's connected by a brown harness plug. according to the gen 1 wiring diagram i have... i have a good ground. I know this is a really really long shot, but can anyone tell me what I should be expecting to test at pins 2-7 on the blend door motor harness for each of the 5 mode buttons? For one of my control units I'm getting 12v to pins 2,3,4 no matter what button is pressed and the other one is sending 12v to all 2-7 pins no matter what button is pressed. I think they are both shorted out or something? Again I did clean the heck out of them by spraying windex above those buttons.